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Liquid Courage: An on-set intimacy coordinator helped ensure Paul Telfer and Linsey Godfrey’s comfort shooting their shower sex scene.
DAYS stars Paul Telfer and Linsey Godfrey tackled the challenge of their scantily-clad shower love scene head-on when Xander and Sarah recently romped under the waterdrops.
Telfer was a shower scene virgin, while Godfrey had some prior experience to draw on. “It was by myself, in a movie. It was just me and a cameraman in a shower together. Very intimate,” recounts the actress with a laugh.
Having an intimacy coordinator on set helped make the experience somewhat easier for the two actors. “That was really awesome,” enthuses Godfrey. “We’d never worked with one before, and she couldn’t have been more lovely or cool, and made us feel really comfortable. She talked to us both about what we were comfortable with — because we didn’t know and they didn’t know, and our director didn’t know. Weirdly enough, I brought what I thought I would want to wear in the shower, and I took a shower with it before, to make sure that [no body parts] went anywhere.”
However, Godfrey’s wardrobe choice proved a bit challenging. “The problem is that you needed to see my sides and my back, so I needed to wear pasties of some sort or sticky cups,” she explains. “But sticky cups actually make me feel really self-conscious, because they pull down on you. I was more scared that the sticky cups would come undone than pasties. I ended up just wearing the pasties. So that was it. I just wanted to make sure that, a) they weren’t see-through; b) they wouldn’t go anywhere; and c) that I was covered up.”
While Telfer wasn’t quite as worried about wardrobe, he did have other concerns. “It was a little odd just because of the way we shoot our show. We’re often in the same sets, even when it’s a different set,” he notes. “It’s [another] set that’s been redressed. Sometimes it’s a bit odd to find yourself in what is usually the detective interrogation room, but they’ve jammed a shower in there and hidden all the other stuff that would normally be there. I also remember being so grateful that the water was warm. I was so worried it was just going to be cold water.”
Then there was the matter of timing things just right. “It was a bit tricky because it was a real shower. It was making real shower noises, and there was real steam,” says Telfer. “I couldn’t see the cues or anything like that. I just had to take my natural cue when I felt a draft as the door opened. So, all the stuff that was on TV was my natural reaction to just turning around and seeing a basically naked Linsey Godfrey.” For her part, Godfrey recalls, “The way that the shower was set up, I, Linsey, was facing our entire cast and crew in my underpants and pasties. You’re like, ‘Wow, this is a humbling thing.’ ”
And certainly not as titillating as the shower sex might have appeared on screen. “You’re dealing with the cameras and trying to play the emotion and all that, but also the nuts and bolts of trying to make shower sex look sexy,” points out Telfer. “When in real life, shower sex is really awkward and slippery — and potentially dangerous!”
